Selling in another country can force a merchant to find out how much growth its payments infrastructure can actually support.

New markets bring local payment preferences, new providers and different transaction economics, while every connection adds another system that has to be integrated, reconciled and maintained. What looked manageable when a merchant operated in one or two markets can become costly as the footprint expands.

“It’s rarely the initial connection that becomes the problem for merchants,” Nick Daley, director of product management at Spreedly, told PYMNTS. “It’s generally the operational and data layers that become the obstacles.”

A provider might send fractional values rather than whole numbers in an installment field, for example. A pending transaction may be treated differently by two providers. Neither problem necessarily prevents the integration from working, but each can complicate the systems responsible for reconciliation and other downstream operations.

Payment preferences create another decision before the merchant gets very far. Consumers in a new market may expect methods that aren’t prominent in the merchant’s home country, making local payment support part of the expansion plan.

“More methods don’t inherently mean ‘better,’ because each one that you add to your payment stack will carry overhead to the stack,” Daley said. “Some are more relevant than others in certain markets.”

Daley said two to four payment methods can account for the overwhelming majority of transaction volume in some markets. Other options may attract relatively little use while still requiring engineering and support resources.

Merchants therefore have to determine where their own customers’ payment volume is likely to concentrate rather than treat the number of available methods as the measure of a localized checkout.

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